John Irving - The Fourth Hand

“Medea won’t die for a long time, Rudy,” Zajac assured his son.

“Mommy says you might kill her, because of the way you lose your temper.”

“I promise I won’t kill Medea, Rudy,” Zajac said. “I won’t lose my temper with her.” (This was typical of how little Hildred had ever understood him; that he lost his temper at dogshit didn’t mean he was angry at dogs!)

“Tell me again why they named her Medea,” the boy said.

It was hard to relate the Greek legend to a six-year-old—just try describing what a sorceress is. But the part about Medea assisting her husband, Jason, in obtaining the Golden Fleece was easier to explain than the part about what Medea does to her own children. Why would anyone name a dog Medea? Dr. Zajac wondered. In the six months since he’d been divorced, Zajac had read more than a dozen books by child psychiatrists about the troubles children have after a divorce. A great emphasis was put on the parents’ having a sense of humor, which was not the hand surgeon’s strongest point.

Zajac’s indulgence in mischief overcame him only in those moments when he was cradling a dog turd in a lacrosse stick. However, in addition to his having been a midfielder at Deerfield, Dr. Zajac had sung in some kind of glee club there. Although his only singing now was in the shower, he felt a spontaneous outpouring of humor whenever he was taking a shower with Rudy. Taking a shower with his father was another item on the small but growing list of things Rudy liked to do with his dad.

Suddenly, to the tune of “I Am the River,” which Rudy had learned to sing in kindergarten—the boy, as many only children do, liked to sing—Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac burst into song.

I am Medea

and I eat my poo.

In an-tiq-ui-ty

I killed my kids, too!

“What?” Rudy said. “Sing that again!” (They’d already discussed antiquity.) When his father sang the song again, Rudy dissolved into laughter. Scatological humor is the best stuff for six-year-olds.

“Don’t sing this around your mother,” Rudy’s father warned him. Thus they had a secret, another step in creating a bond between them.

Over time, two copies of Stuart Little made their way home with Rudy, but Hildred would not read it to the boy; worse, she threw away both copies of the book. It wasn’t until Rudy caught her throwing away Charlotte’s Web that he told his father, which became another bond between them.

Every weekend they were together, Zajac read all of either Stuart Little or Charlotte’s Web to Rudy. The little boy never tired of them. He cried every time Charlotte died; he laughed every time Stuart crashed the dentist’s invisible car. And, like Stuart, when Rudy was thirsty, he told his father that he had “a ruinous thirst.” (The first time, naturally, Rudy had to ask his father what “ruinous”

meant.)

Meanwhile, although Dr. Zajac had made much headway in contradicting Hildred’s message to Rudy—the boy was increasingly convinced that his father did love him—the hand surgeon’s small-minded colleagues were nonetheless convincing themselves that they were superior to Zajac because of the alleged unhappiness and undernourishment of Zajac’s six-year-old son. At first Dr. Zajac’s colleagues felt superior to him because of Irma, too. They regarded her as a clear loser’s choice among housekeepers; but when Irma began to transform herself, they soon noticed her, long before Zajac himself showed any signs of sharing their interest.

His failure to be aware of Irma’s transformation was further proof of Dr. Zajac’s being a madman of the unseeing variety. The girl had dropped twenty pounds; she’d joined a gym. She ran three miles a day—she was no mere jogger, either. If her new wardrobe was lacking in taste, it quite consciously showed off her body. Irma would never be beautiful, but she was built. Hildred would start the rumor that her ex-husband was dating a stripper. (Divorced women in their forties are not known for their charitableness toward well-built women in their twenties.) Irma, don’t forget, was in love. What did she care? One night she tiptoed, naked, through the dark upstairs hall. She’d rationalized that if Zajac had not gone to bed, and if he happened to see her without her clothes on, she would tell him she was a sleepwalker and that some force had drawn her to his room. Irma longed for Dr. Zajac to see her naked—by accident, of course—because she had developed more than a terrific body; she’d also developed a stalwart confidence in it. But tiptoeing past the doctor’s closed bedroom door, Irma was halted by the baffling conviction that she’d overheard Dr. Zajac praying. Prayer struck Irma, who was not religious, as a suspiciously unscientific activity for a hand surgeon. She listened at the doctor’s door a little longer and was relieved to hear that Zajac wasn’t praying—he was just reading Stuart Little aloud to himself in a prayerful voice.

“ ‘At suppertime he took his ax, felled a dandelion, opened a can of deviled ham, and had a light supper of ham and dandelion milk,’ ” Dr. Zajac read from Stuart Little.

Irma was shaken by her love for him, but the mere mention of deviled ham made her feel ill. She tiptoed back to her bedroom off the kitchen, pausing to munch some raw carrots out of the bowl of melting ice in the fridge. When would the lonely man ever notice her?

Irma ate a lot of nuts and dried fruit; she ate fresh fruit, too, and mounds of raw vegetables. She could concoct a mean steamed fish with gingerroot and black beans, which made such an impression on Dr. Zajac that the doctor startled Irma (and everyone who knew him) by hosting an impromptu dinner party for his medical-school students.

Zajac imagined that one of his Harvard boys might ask Irma out; she seemed lonely to him, as did most of the boys. Little did the doctor know that Irma had eyes only for him. Once Irma had been introduced to his young male med students as his “assistant”—and because she was so obviously a piece of ass—they assumed he was already banging her and abandoned all hope. (Zajac’s female med students probably thought that Irma was every bit as desperate-looking as Zajac.) No matter. Everyone loved the steamed fish with gingerroot and black beans, and Irma had other recipes. She treated Medea’s dog food with meat tenderizer, because she’d read in a magazine at her dentist’s office that meat tenderizer made a dog’s poo unappetizing, even to a dog. But Medea seemed to find the tenderizer enhancing.

Dr. Zajac sprinkled the birdseed in the outdoor birdfeeder with red pepper flakes; he’d told Irma that this made the birdseed inedible to squirrels. Afterward, Irma tried sprinkling Medea’s dog turds with red pepper flakes, too. While this was visually interesting, especially against the new-fallen snow, the dog found the pepper off-putting only initially.

And drawing even greater attention to the dogshit in his yard did not please Zajac. He had a far simpler, albeit more athletic method of preventing Medea from eating her own shit. He got to her turds first, with his lacrosse stick. He usually deposited the turds in the ubiquitous brown paper bag, although on occasion Irma had seen him take a shot at a squirrel in a tree clear across Brattle Street. Dr. Zajac missed the squirrel every time, but the gesture went straight to Irma’s heart. While it was too soon to say if the girl Hildred had named “Nick’s stripper” would ever find her way into Zajac’s heart, there was another area of concern at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates: it was only a matter of time before Dr. Zajac, although he was still in his forties, would have to be included in the title of Boston’s foremost surgical associates in hand treatment. Soon it would have to be Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink, Zajac & Associates. Don’t think this didn’t gall the eponymous Schatzman, even though he was retired. Don’t think it didn’t rile the surviving Gingeleskie brother, too. In the old days, when the other Gingeleskie was alive, they were Schatzman, Gingeleskie & Gingeleskie—this being before Mengerink’s time. (Dr. Zajac said privately that he doubted Dr. Mengerink could cure a hangnail.) As for Mengerink, he’d had an affair with Hildred when she was still married to Zajac; yet he despised Zajac for getting a divorce, even though the divorce had been Hildred’s idea. Unbeknownst to Dr. Zajac, his ex-wife was on a mission to drive Dr. Mengerink crazy, too. It seemed the cruelest of fates, to Mengerink, that Zajac’s name was soon destined to follow his on the venerable surgical associates’ letterhead and nameplate. But if Dr. Zajac pulled off the country’s first hand transplant, they would all be lucky if they weren’t renamed Zajac, Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates. (Worse things could happen. No doubt Harvard would soon make Zajac an associate professor.)